New York has long held a special allure for artist from all over the world. But at some point in the past several years, the tectonic plates of creativity in the city shifted, and Manhattan become a suburb of Brooklyn. A current show at the Brooklyn Museum surveys the recent art from the borough made by thirty-five local artists among them two Japanese-born: Yuji Agematsu and Nobutaka Aozaki, who made Brooklyn their home.
Yuji Agematsu, who landed in the US in 1980, has spent much of his adult life collecting discarded materials on walks through New York, then archiving his finds in banker's boxes stored in his studio and, on occasion, mining his trove to create delicate, ephemeral installations. Sometimes the pickings are displayed unchanged and sometimes they are combined into new arrangements with the elegantly formalistic effect.
Nobutaka Aozaki works are likewise ephemeral. Aozaki has created a portrait station inspired by caricaturists in Times Square. Except Aozaki has replaced drawing paper with plastic smiley face bags—onto which the artist Sharpies hair, glasses, etc. The result: a bunch of photos of visitors holding up their bags vaguely in their likeness and smiling.
The exhibition runs through January 4th 2015.
